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This Beautiful Concept Phone Looks Like It Was Designed by James Bond

Steven Blum2012-10-10T16:22:22ZOct 10, 2012

Steven Blum
Steven Blum has written more than 2,000 blog posts as a founding member of AndroidPIT's English editorial team. A graduate of the University of Washington, Steven Blum also studied Journalism at George Washington University in Washington D.C. for two years. Since then, his writing has appeared in The Stranger, The Seattle P-I, Blackbook Magazine and Venture Villlage. He loves the HTC One and hopes the company behind it still exists in a few years.

I poured through a lot of totally unimaginative concept phones to find the one I'm showing you today. Called the LG Flutter, the phone opens like a Chinese fan to display your app drawer, then snaps shut to become your standard cell phone, with just a bit of display peeking out for notifications.

It's not at all a realistic phone, but that doesn't stop me from loving it. In fact, a bit of whimsy is usually what I want in a concept phone. And while displaying your apps on a thin arc of screen real estate may not suit everyone, I like the idea of a screen that scrolls radially.

I think it also looks like a satisfying way to open and close a smartphone – but that could just be because I secretly miss flip phones.*

Comments

People will want walk around with dedicated advertising/gps tracking devices... on their faces?

Google is like a billionaire heiress who has no clue what to do with money so she buys tiger cubs and invests in a company claiming to make sports cars from cotton candy and unicorns. The most practical idea they ever had was targeted ads based on your search history. It's a good idea, but the money really has unleashed the stupid.

@Ben I wouldn't dismiss Google Glass outright at the moment. The idea has merit and it may not be polished enough or functional at the moment but it is a first generation product. If Google can actually refine the input method and integrate the tech into normal looking glasses, I can see people walking around with augmented reality headpieces and maybe depend on them the way we do our phones. It may be 5 to 10 years a way but every journey starts with a step. In the 80s and cell phones ran off batteries as big as car batteries that held a charge for a couple of hours and you needed a suitcase the size of a laptop bag. Fast forward 30 years or so and we have mini computers for phones that fit in our pockets ans runs for a day between charges. We just have to wait for technology to catch up with the idea.

Actually this is very interesting concept. Not from a practical standpoint of course. Neither from the current "highbrow" aesthetical criteria.

But, it has a certain quality of conceptual thinking and contemplation, and courage to distance oneself from conventional thinking in design. And this dimension of extreme conceptual "brainstorming", that doesn't have to be practical... that's something a true designer must have in order to operate on a practical level in a creative way. This is the method of "exercising" creativity.